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May 1, 2012 Comments Off on Congratulations and Farewell to our Departing Editors!

Since Devil’s Lake is a journal run by MFAs and post-graduate fellows, the month of May brings some necessary farewells. We at Devil’s Lake want to thank our outgoing editors for their service, and brag a little bit about where they’re headed!

Two of our editors, Jacques Rancourt (founding poetry editor and interim editor-in-chief) and Nicole Cullen (senior editor) are headed to Stanford University as Stegner Fellows. Prose editor Marian Palaia is also headed out West, as the 2012-13 Steinbeck Fellow at San Jose State University.

If we’ve missed anyone’s future plans, do let us know. And to all our departing editors: thank you and good luck!

April 18, 2012 Comments Off on Tracy K. Smith wins the Pulitzer! New Reviews!

We want to extend a wholehearted congratulations to Tracy K. Smith for winning the Pulitzer Prize! For more information about Tracy and Life on Mars (the prize-winning book), check out our interview with her, which can be found here.

While you’re at it, go check out these two new awesome reviews on Devil’s Lake!

Bhanu Kapil,Schizophrene

“The human mind cannot remember or force itself to remember everything that happens. That would be asking it to go insane.”
—Javeel Alam, in “Remembering Partition”

That impossible insanity is the starting point in Schizophrene, the latest book of poems by Bhanu Kapil. Concerned with migration, memory, and madness, particularly within the context of the Partition of India, Schizophrenesets out its own project: to write an antidote to displacement and trauma. {READ MORE}

–OLIVER BENDORF

Erica Wright,Instructions for Killing the Jackal

Leaving aside for a moment the old saying about judging books, the cover of Erica Wright’s Instructions for Killing the Jackal provides a few tantalizing clues about the odd and beguiling poems that lie within. The cover image, set on a tan backdrop, appears at first to be a muted botanical, with vines and petals and berries criss-crossing the page. A closer look reveals something more sinister. From one lush plant extends a blackened talon, and near the bottom of the image, where the plant’s root structure might be, the viewer finds instead a flesh-colored skeleton lying supine on jagged rocks. And so it is with Wright’s poems, in which the natural world is rendered in precise detail, at once beautiful, violent, and grotesque. {READ MORE}